Ties with Cuba: The Times-Picayune covers 175 years of New Orleans history

The bonds between New Orleans and the island country of Cuba are personified in the generation of refugees who fled the Castro revolution and started over in the Crescent City. But they run much deeper and encompass religious leaders, the fathers of communities, a national flag and history-changing conflicts.

175 years of history

New Orleans’ first bishop, Luis Ignatius Penalver y Cardenas, was born in Havana. Pierre le Moyne d’Iberville, who explored Louisiana and is the brother of New Orleans’ founder, is buried in Havana.

New Orleans native Louis Jean Laurent de Clouet de Piettre y Favrot founded the Cuban city of Cienfuegos. And before the island became a republic, Cuba’s present flag was first flown on Poydras Street in New Orleans in 1850.

During Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain in the 1890s, the rebels’ exiled military leader, Antonio Maceo, resided in Treme. He shared a home briefly with fervent Cuban patriot Jose Marti, a poet-writer whose works supported his homeland’s autonomy from Spanish colonialism.

There is a statue adorning the neutral ground along Jefferson Davis Parkway dedicated to Marti, who made a trio of visits to New Orleans during the two years preceding the outbreak in 1895 of Cuba’s War of Independence from Spain.

That monument often serves as a gathering place for anti-Fidel Castro demonstrations by members of a community who permanently left Cuba for New Orleans as well as Miami after 1959, when Castro’s forces overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista prior to reorganizing as a communist government. New Orleans had been Cuba’s largest trading partner in the United States before the revolution.

Having ports linked on maritime trade routes, mutual musical influences and similar architecture also illustrate the firm ties between New Orleans and Cuba.